There is an idea that EB Bolles argued for in his blog, Babel’s Dawn (here), and his book by the same name. It is that words are in effect pointers than force the listener’s attention to a topic or element of a topic. So if I say ‘flag’ and there is a flag near by, your attention will shift to that flag, and, if there is no flag in sight, your attention with shift to the concept of flag in your mind. The shift would be automatic. Words steer attention and force it to find what matches the word; the meaning of a word is the collection of concepts that it can force into attention. This idea depends on whether attention can be steered and the usual example used the illustrate the effect is the way we follow a pointing finger or another person’ gaze.
A recent paper (see citation) confirms that both gaze and arrows can steer attention. Here is what they did:
…we aimed at testing a strong definition of resistance to suppression for orienting of attention elicited by these two cues. In five experiments, participants were informed with 100% certainty about the future location of a target they had to react to by presentation of either a direction word at the beginning of each trial or instructions at the beginning of each block. Gaze and arrows were presented before the target as uninformative distractors irrelevant for the task. The results showed similar patterns for gaze and arrowsnamely, an interference effect when the distractors were incongruent with the upcoming target location. This suggests that the orienting of attention mediated by gaze and arrows can be considered as strongly automatic.
The finding that the information conveyed by distractors interfered with the task indicates that orienting of attention mediated by both gaze and arrows resists suppression and can be defined as strongly automatic. Indeed, even though participants were informed with 100% certainty about the upcoming target location, and, thus, they were motivated to voluntarily attend to that location, results showed that they could not ignore the information conveyed by the distractors.
The authors do not seem to view the arrow as a stand-in for pointing and therefore likely to be a similar cue to gaze one that we are innately supplied with. My opinion is that it is likely to be closely related to pointing. Humans and some animals do follow pointing at an early age.
However, it is important to point out that the similar behavioural effect obtained for gaze and arrowsnamely, the elicitation of an automatic attention shiftdoes not necessarily imply that the underlying processes are the same for these two cue types. Indeed, arrows are able to elicit an automatic attention shift probably because they are a well-learned symbol, which conveys a strong spatial information that is reinforced every day, for instance by means of road signs. On the contrary, gaze is likely to trigger an automatic attention orienting because it may represent a special cue characterized by a strong biological significance given its relevance in everyday life, and, for such reasons, humans would have developed a reflexive attention shift in response to the view of an averted gaze that would also be supported by a dedicated neural circuit. Moreover, the presence of gaze-mediated orienting of attention in both new-borns as young as 2 days old and several species of nonhuman primates suggests that this phenomenon can be defined as innate, thus reinforcing the special nature of gaze as compared to other cue types.
It is not easy to see how communication is possible unless there is some sort of ‘steering attention to x’ mechanism so that one brain could influence the events in another brain. That is after all what communication is. Studying the control of attention is important to many aspects of neuroscience (preception, consciousness, communication at least).
Galfano G., Dalmaso M., Marzoli D., Pavan G., Coricelli C., & Castelli L. (2012). Eye gaze cannot be ignored (but neither can arrows) The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
“There is an idea that EB Bolles argued for in his blog, Babels Dawn (here), and his book by the same name. It is that words are in effect pointers than force the listeners attention to a topic or element of a topic. So if I say flag and there is a flag near by, your attention will shift to that flag, and, if there is no flag in sight, your attention with shift to the concept of flag in your mind. The shift would be automatic. Words steer attention and force it to find what matches the word; the meaning of a word is the collection of concepts that it can force into attention.”
But if we were standing under a flag and I said “I’d like to flag up the fact that…X” your attention would be drawn to X, not to the flag.
Perhaps “flag” has an additional meaning of “to highlight” as well as “symbolic cloth”. But still, the primary purpose of the word flag in that sentence is not to draw attention *to my act of highlighting*, it’s to draw attention to X.
JK: You are right in a sense. I did not deal with metaphor which, of course, is a major part of meaning. When the metaphor is ‘conventional’, it is just another meaning of the word. But when it is novel, there has to be hints of the existence of the metaphor or the utterance will not make sense.
As far as the exact part of a sentence that attention falls on I think it falls on each word/small phrase in order. So in your example, I would understand that you-would like-to flag up-fact x as four points of mental attention and connected in working memory into the meaning of the sentence. The organisation of the attention points would be fitted to the agent-action-outcome or one of the other causal ways we understand the world. Again the series of attention point has to make sense or the utterance can not be understood.
Bolles may agree or not with this extension of his basic idea. I think he would but I am not sure.
By the way, I follow and enjoy your blog very much.